Early Access version 118

Early Access
262

I don’t think it would be appropriate to play the same wave again and again. lemme see what the publicity say:

Do you want to prevent repetition of any wave?
  • Yes.
  • No.
0 voters

I considered that. You can make them rarely appear if possible.

However I don’t think there can be someone who stare at planets alot. But do what you see fit.

I would say judging by how many they are in a single wave, I would say some or many people gets hit by dozens of fireballs, also I got my 9 Coolants depleted in no time from them in “Over the Rainbow” wave.

I didn’t see any firepowers or gifts being dropped there.

1 Like
263

well yeah, i do dodge them

but in cases where i do get hit, its either because theres too many other things to avoid already, or there is simply no way to avoid them at the moment

in such a case theres usually more than one phoenix involved

1 Like
265

Game design wise: the goal is the same, to eliminate squadron assignments from leaderboards.
What you’ve suggested not only does this, but also reduces the squadron’s total points, which is just unnecessary, as competition-wise it’s the same, but it’s just lower.

Also: Newbies could use the squadron bonus to get higher tiers easier,
your method completely destroys the meaning of this, which is why I mainly disagree with your implementation.

1 Like
266

There is a probability penalty that prevents a wave from repeating too many times: from the second time, the same wave has a much lower chance of appearing compared to the first time (maybe except certain special waves like Asteroids).

1 Like
267

Suggestion:
Yolk Star Terminators should poke their head out (no actual hitbox) for 1 sec before actually appearing (like in Exclusion Zone) to act as a “spawn warning” of sorts.
I hate it when you have to get to a corner to get something important, or go down to the bottom to get extra firepower before I miss it, then a chicken just spawns right at your face with no questions asked. How am I supposed to dodge that?
A 1 second window is enough to not make it unfair for these edge cases while keeping its intended difficulty.

1 Like
268

Also, currently the pathfinding system prioritizes paths on your current constellation instead of the actual shortest path when it comes to Interstellar highway travels. I think.

One example of this:
When I travel to star system A: this is the route it took.

travel_to_star_system_A
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However, when I travel to star system B, it jumped straight to star system A, then goes to B with a shorter amount of fuel spent.
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So why did the system not jump straight to A when I wanted to go there (it’s clearly possible to via Interstellar - proven via going to B), yet took the longer route?

269

This may be an unpopular opinion, but I liked it back when SSH and Virtuoso had no warning (and by extension, no safety and anomaly) zones visible, it felt more of a challenge (right now, only DTs satisfy that itch). When it was changed a while back to show everything, it made the game feel easier. So, maybe there could be a change, regarding difficulty?

I would like to see a new difficulty that removes the zone visibility. To keep some consistency seen with the difficulties, this new difficulty level (the name is Savant, as you’d know where things are by now) would have a 250% boost to scores, missions will be 45% harder, 35% faster projectiles and “massively” improved key drop rates. I would go up with the given 10% intervals, but this could be a bit much, unless some think otherwise.

The quip/description for Savant would be: “I can do this with my eyes closed!” The idea being that there’s no zones showing, thus flying “blind”.

An alternative would be to have the existing SSH difficulty have no zones visible (like it had before) and keep Virtuoso as it is now. The difficulty values of the SSH without visible zones would remain as it is now. This would feel more like a natural stepping stone, where when one is confident enough to venture into SSH from Virtuoso, they would have some knowledge of where zones will be and where chickens will spawn, putting the knowledge they gained to good use.

Unless I’m mistaken, there was some old images that had more difficulty bits on the “dial” before it was redone to be the existing six. So, making a seventh should be possible.

Should a new Difficulty be made?
  • Create a Savant Difficulty
  • Redo existing SSH Difficulty
  • No changes

0 voters

And if people ask about how I handled waves like Shear Stress and Merry Go Round beforehand, I’d stay at the center of the screen and move into position once I see the alignment of the chickens as they come in. For waves like Splat!, the gravity alignment is easy to know where they come in.

270

There’s that gap in game design to respect between “very hard” and “unfair” when it comes to difficulty in games.

Very hard is … very hard, but fair. You know the rules and the gimmicks of the level, it’s just hard in how you win it.

Unfair is a different beast though.
The game expects you to win … without knowing the rules of the game. That’s unfair.

You’re asking for this mode in particular, which is not a popular opinion, especially so when there are new levels and players are simply too lazy to switch out difficulties every time just to try out levels that they don’t even know if it’s gonna show up due to randomization.

So yeah, I’m going against it just because of this simple reason.
Also, not everyone plays the same way you did. And I like it better that way.
It’s just more fun for everyone if there are multiple ways to play the game.

This is especially true to games that are not strictly linear like rhythm games, such as this one.
There’s some strategy involved, so there has to be multiple ways to play and to win because of it.

2 Likes
271

Hiding wave zones do not make the missions any more difficult for players that remember everything, while at the same time make it unfair for new players or players who return after a long time after two massive updates that added a ton of player suggested waves. There’s a reason this used to be in the game but eventually become negatively received and removed later. Indeed, there were originally 8 difficulty modes, iA has decided not to add them for now, but never said that it would never be added, so adding them (with actual fair difficulty increase) is still possible.

2 Likes
272

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Umm… is THIS “working” ?

And this?

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Each bullet hits each chick killed but doesn’t “penetrate”.

273

Oh, I also found a bug where the Boron Railgun spawns behind the ship for a split millisecond and clips through enemies when overdriving and firing manually.

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1 Like
274

Vice versa, sometimes I feel Tourist isn’t enough. Can there be an even easier difficulty?

275

Removing Visilibity of zones is never a good reason because of these:

1-New Players who might reach this difficulty soon as they start.
2-players that have forgotten wave formations.
3-the new waves that gets added yearly which you can’t foresight it correctly.

And most importantly, this is against the game’s rule and makes this one unfair.

1 Like
276

Artifical difficulty

Amirite?

277

is this a subtle star trek reference aside from the picardy third

now design a chicken after picard who would facepalm each time you die

3 Likes
278

I feel Ironman doesn’t need zones tbh because it’s tough competition and it would be something a bit harder to predict the wave formations in first attempt, and if you wanna improve and get better score, you will play it again with everything u remember from last attempt.
Let me borrow this quote

Yea simply because of these thing, it makes this more sense
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Welp, let me poll this:

Should zones in Ironman be removed?
  • Yes
  • No
0 voters

Don’t take this seriously if you disagree

279

I mean yes it is supposedly a challenge. but it should have fair rules as others. it wouldn’t make sense to remove the zones either for the same mentioned reasons.

280

A challenge should still be fair, so no.
If you’re a first timer on Ironman and doesn’t remember all the waves avaliable (there are tons + lots more added soon I’m guessing) you’ll find it to be more unfair than difficult.

Like I said in this post:

Also, I get that if you’ve remembered all the waves formation after years of playing, you won’t find this to be unfair. But not all players are like that.
Expecting players that joined a few years later to perform exactly like this is a bad move.
And it just makes for a very one-sided competition where the players who’ve played this game for the longest of times win. That’s kinda it. No suprises, no fun.

281

You make it sound as if it happens all the time. The wave’s chance (“weight”) of being selected drops to 1% after it is chosen once, and to 0.01% if it was the immediately preceding wave. But it’s non-zero, so it’s possible.

Changed in v.119 . Although clearly they do have hitboxes while peeking out.

Because I don’t want to implemented a generalized GPS algorithm.

When you are travelling between constellations, the algorithm:

  • First takes you to star system within the current constellation which is closest to your destination (“target”).

  • Then, it selects the next constellation to jump to. All constellations are considered. Suitability depends on:
    (a) how far off-course constellation center takes us (in-line centers are preferred over out-of-the-way ones)
    (b) how far the constellation is (closer constellations are preferred over more distant ones)
    (c) whether that constellation allows to be used as an intermediate stop

  • Having selected a constellation, it then travels to whichever system in that constellation is nearest.

Yes, it is. I think that there is a misunderstanding here. Each projectile does not penetrate through multiple enemies. But if there are e.g. 3 projectiles and the first one kills and enemy, the other two will ignore (“penetrate through”) that enemy and potentially hit other targets. Previously, all 3 projectiles would hit the same enemy.

Were you moving erratically at the time? Or were you stationary?

It certainly is. And it’s not so subtle as you might think.

8 Likes
282

can we have the first 6 seconds of the theme

6 Likes